LK: “What about this? You collect manhole covers? Not actual manhole covers, one would assume, or drains. What is it… is this true?”

JC: “Well, are we talking privately here?”

LK: “No, there’s people listening out there!”

JC: “Oh really?… Well, actually, I got this from my mother. An interest in the sort of social history of how things happen, and if you walk around and look at drain covers, you’ll see in London MWB, Metropolitan Board of Works. That gives you the age of it, the Metropolitan Board of Works hasn’t been around for a long time. If you look at post office telegraphs, that’ll tell you the time they went, look at LCC tramways, look at the same in Glasgow, look at the same with Edinburgh. So you see a history of public utilities in drain covers. Some of them are quite artistic. I know this sounds a bit zany, but history is what we all live all the time, and it’s a kind of social history, so people look at the history of roads and the history of trams and housing and all this and I think looking at the way cities grow it also comes within it the architecture the different migrant groups that came. Look at the old Huguenot architecture in the east end of London, where did that come from? It came from the Hugeunots coming from what we call the low countries. Look at the same in the north east of England, the influence of Scandinavian architecture. We all come from somewhere don’t we? That’s what’s fascinating about history.”